WNC Bear hunting season starts with healthy, growing population
Bear hunting season kicks off in Western North Carolina Oct. 18, amid a healthy and growing population of black bears in the mountains that experts are looking to stabilize.
Western North Carolina is home to anywhere between 7,000-9,000 black bears, a population that’s growing between 5%-7% every year, said Colleen Olfenbuttel, black bear and furbearer biologist with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission.
“We’re trying to get it down to 1%-2%, that’s our objective,” she said.
Hunting is one of the primary ways to reach that objective, Olfenbuttel said, a highly regulated way for officials to keep tabs on bear populations.
“It’s a really healthy population,” said Justin McVey, mountain region wildlife biologist for the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission. “The bears are really healthy and look great, and we would like to just kind of slow that growth down. We don’t want them expanding any further east and don’t want more in these urban and suburban (areas).”
A recent study found that urban bears around Asheville are larger and reproducing sooner than their rural counterparts, and locals are reporting more and more bear interactions.
“In the Asheville area, cars are the number one cause of mortality (for bears),” Olfenbuttel said. “It’s completely unregulated, but of course it risks human safety and we don’t like for a bear to die that way.”
Looking at all the ways bears die, from cars, hunting or starvation, she said regulated hunting is the preferred way to manage those population.
“From our perspective, bears have been restored in North Carolina,” she said.
Efforts are now turning to managing the bear population, a balance between cultural carrying capacity, or how many bears a community will tolerate, and the biological carrying capacity, or how many bears a local habitat can support.
In areas around Asheville, populations have already exceeded that cultural carrying capacity, Olfenbuttel said, but there’s still plenty of biological carrying capacity.
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Hunting, along with proper practices like BearWise to discourage human-bear interactions, is one of the ways to find that balance, and is highly regulated, she said.
“If we need to grow more bears, we can be very conservative with hunting,” she said. “If we need to stabilize the population, maybe we make the season more liberal.”
Bear season for the Western Bear Management Unit in and west of Surry, Wilkes, Caldwell, Burke and Cleveland Counties runs Oct. 18-Nov. 20 and Dec. 13-Jan. 1, with different dates in the Piedmont and Eastern portions of the state, according to NCWRC.
Hunters must have their big game license and a Bear Management E-Stamp, McVey said, which allows each hunter to harvest a single bear per season.
On average, 75,00-85,000 North Carolinians get a stamp, Olfenbuttel said, but there are only about 10,000-13,000 active bear hunters, and fewer than a third of those will actually harvest a bear during the hunting season.
According to a North Carolina Black Bear Annual Report compiled by Offenbuttel, there were 3,476 bears harvested statewide during the 2019 season, including 1,290 in the Mountain Bear Management Unit.
Those stamps also come with a new requirement this year for hunters to submit teeth from bears they’ve killed, she said, something that’s been voluntary since the 1970s, but which is essential to monitor bear populations.
From those teeth, researchers can count growth rings like in a tree to determine how old the bear is, data that’s used in population reconstruction models.
Hounds and harvests
“The majority of bear hunting is done by hounds, it’s the traditional way of hunting,” McVey said.
The NCWRC report says the use of dogs to hunt bears is a technique that goes back centuries, and the Plott hound, a strain of hound developed for that purpose, is the state dog of North Carolina.
More:Study: Bears in Asheville twice as big, reproduce in half the time of rural counterparts
In Buncombe County, though, there is still quite a bit of still hunting, or hunting without dogs, McVey said, and a good amount of harvest.
The state report says that in 2019, 70% of bears in the Mountain Bear Management Unit were harvested by dogs, and 30% by still hunters.
During the 2020-21 season, McVey said there were 121 bears harvested in Buncombe County and 837 bears harvested in the 12-county district he covers.
That’s a slight increase over the previous year, he said, though harvests usually run between 600-800 bears.
There are a lot of private lands and a lot of bears in Buncombe, McVey said, which leads to a good amount of bears harvested.
Hunters tend to be picky when harvesting bears, McVey said, aiming for larger, trophy bears and letting the smaller ones go.
Of the 329 bears harvested in the mountain area that were sampled by the state, Olfenbuttel’s report found 66% were between 100-299 pounds, with 24.7% between 300-499 pounds and three bears, or 6.2%, were between 500-599 pounds.
The average weight of bear harvested in the mountains has been stable to slightly increasing over the past 20 years, the report says, with the average weight clocking in at 235 pounds in 2019.
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Staying safe in the woods, at home
“Bear hunters are responsible people and don’t shoot anything that moves,” McVey said, adding that most hunters with dogs will likely have the bear treed, reducing the likelihood of accidents with hikers or their dogs.
Most hiking around Asheville is also done in areas that are bear sanctuaries where hunting isn’t allowed, such as the Pisgah Bear Sanctuary in Buncombe, Haywood, Henderson and Transylvania Counties.
Still, he said it’s always a good idea to wear blaze orange or bright colors during the fall hunting season, calling it “mutual respect for other users and letting people know you’re there.”
There are also things to keep in mind when not in the woods.
According to Olfenbuttel’s report, 1,733 human-bear interactions were reported statewide in 2018, and 1,323 in 2019, the most recent year included in the report. Of those, 1,143 and 676 respectively, were reported in the 12 westernmost counties.
Buncombe and Henderson counties have the highest rates of human-bear interactions in the state, the only two counties in the state that reported more than 100 incidents to NCWRC in 2019.
McVey’s first recommendation are BearWise practices like never feeding or approaching bears, securing food and garbage containers, cleaning and storing grills, not leaving pet food outside and removing bird feeders.
Olfenbuttel also promoted BearWise as a tool to help control populations, saying communities around Asheville are working to become BearWise certified.
Highlands has become the first BearWise certified city in the U.S., she said.
All of that human-provided food is making bears in Asheville more acclimated to humans and therefore more bold around humans, Olfenbuttel said.
“The No. 1 thing: don’t feed bears,” she said. “It’s drawing them in, it’s keeping them in, as well as exposing them to hazards in the urban landscape, which is primarily cars.”
But, if a bear is threatening people or damaging property, it’s totally acceptable and legal for people to defend themselves, McVey said.
If that happens, which he says is fairly rare, the person must contact NCWRC within 24 hours, which would then take the bear, take some measurements and inform the local game warden.
“Living with bears takes a multi-pronged approach,” he said. “We live in bear country.”
And if everyone can get on board with BearWise and other appropriate practices, there would be fewer interactions, and bears wouldn’t learn to associate humans with food, McVey said.
Derek Lacey covers health care, growth and development for the Asheville Citizen Times. Reach him at [email protected] or 828-417-4842 and find him on Twitter @DerekAVL.
